“This freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge, a consideration of much practical import. In the first instance it must be guaranteed by law. But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty, there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population. Such an ideal of external liberty can never be fully attained but must be sought unremittingly if scientific thought, and philosophical and creative thinking in general, are to be advanced as far as possible.”

— Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, 1954

First things first

The First Amendment binds the government, so the government has gotten rather good at punishing speech without restricting it. In Florida, we read this week, the state wildlife commission ran its critics’ names through a restricted database. At West Point, civilian professors were made to ask permission before publishing. None of this required a censorship law. In 1785, Madison warned us “to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.” He understood too well that the men who overturned the liberties of Rome were ever careful to keep the Senate in session as they did so.

Florida wildlife officials pulls records on critics

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officials used a restricted government database to pull personal information on more than 20 environmental activists, accessing retired turtle farmer Jim Watt’s records 34 times even though the agency says he was never under criminal investigation.

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“Public meetings exist so citizens can question, challenge, and sometimes anger the officials who exercise power over them,” writes . “That process breaks down when people have to wonder whether criticism will invite government scrutiny.”

Below the fold

• Public employers have had to cough up $4 million and counting for firing workers over posts about Charlie Kirk, framing online backlash as workplace “disruption.”

• A federal judge barred West Point from requiring civilian professors to get approval for outside speech.

• A federal judge refused to block the firing of three Stars and Stripes staffers who were punished for defending the paper’s editorial independence, saying their speech was made as government employees, not private citizens.

• Jimmy Kimmel says ABC will not broadcast his interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico because of FCC threats over political guest bookings, so the interview will instead appear on YouTube.

• University of Washington will pay $600,000 to settle computer science professor Stuart Reges’ case after a court held the school violated his rights by punishing him for parodying an indigenous land acknowledgment.

Around the world

Australia’s most senior public servants are urging the government to stop politicians from editing and sharing clips of parliamentary hearings on social media, arguing that viral excerpts can expose officials to “harmful” comments. As explains, “Ridiculing bureaucrats who make and enforce public policy, and are often well-paid in the process, is not a subversion of the democratic process. It is a component of it.”

By the numbers

261 schools, 63,000 students, one major trend. This week, FIRE released its annual College Free Speech Rankings. Chicago takes first for the third time in seven years. NYU takes last, with Washington, Texas State, Northeastern, and Rutgers–New Brunswick keeping it company at the bottom. The national average is the best score in seven years, but still a D-. That’s 121 Fs against 24 schools managing a C or better. UC Davis is the comeback kid, going from 252 to 24, the biggest jump of the year. Harvard also came roaring back, from 245 to 71.

Worth a listen

The Blessings of Liberty explores constitutional history, Supreme Court debates, and the “American Idea,” hosted by bestselling author and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen.

In this episode, award-winning journalist joins to discuss his most recent book, Emancipation War: The Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the Thirteenth Amendment. In Emancipation War, Root chronicles the wide-ranging movement against slavery — consisting of white and Black visionaries operating both inside and outside the halls of power, fighting both on and off the battlefield — that made the Constitution’s antislavery Thirteenth Amendment possible.

So to Speak takes an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define free speech — hosted by FIRE’s Nico Perrino.

In this episode, Nico explores the First Amendment’s original meaning and what originalism can — and can’t — tell us about its free speech clause. Joining to discuss are Stanford Law professor Jud Campbell, author of Natural Rights and the First Amendment, and NYU professor of journalism Stephen Solomon, the founding editor of First Amendment Watch and the author of Revolutionary Dissent.

Today in history with

On Sept. 13, 1977, ABC premiered Soap, a prime-time send-up of daytime soaps that took on homosexuality, religion, organized crime, cults, mental illness, and race. A leaked ABC memo flagged the worrying bits: an openly gay character with a football-player boyfriend, a priest who wanted to swap communion wafers for Oreos, and an affair with a Jesuit that produced a pregnancy and an exorcism.

Religious groups mobilized before anyone had seen an episode. The Catholic Church, led by the L.A. archdiocese, called for a boycott, warning the show was “probably one of the most effective arguments for government censorship of TV that has yet come along.” The Southern Baptist Convention’s Sunday School Board dumped 2,500 shares of ABC stock. A coalition aimed a letter-writing campaign at ABC and its advertisers, arguing television was “primarily a family medium.” One ABC vice president found his 11-year-old had been assigned a protest letter as homework. Advertisers fled, ad rates fell, promotion was scrapped, and 18 of 195 affiliates refused to air it. But the controversy actually sold the show, and it ran four seasons to strong reviews and solid ratings. Episode one carried the first “Viewer Discretion Advised” warning in U.S. network history, but the warning was gone by season two.

In the comments

Ink and opinion

Many of the free speech fights today rest on the question: How do we protect kids online? But some of the battles over what can be said or shared on the internet are about protecting a remarkably less vulnerable — and significantly more powerful — group from so-called harm: public officials. One such case is in Australia, where top bureaucrat body the Secretaries Board is asking Parliament to cap politicians’ and parties’ ability to share and criticize clips of testimony from the very officials the board represents.

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‘Ridicule’ directed at public officials

In a recent submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Parliamentary Standards’ inquiry into workplace behavior codes, the Secretaries Board raised concerns about challenges facing public servants and officials, including members of the military and heads of government agencies, when acting as witnesses before Parliament.

One of the Board’s “emerging concerns” is that politicians, political parties, and “third parties” can excerpt “short segments of committee broadcasts and distribute them to large audiences via social media.” In doing so, the Board notes, they can present “incomplete” clips of exchanges, remove segments from their “broader context,” add “captions with highlights or additional commentary,” and “invite ridicule, hostility or abuse directed at individual officials.”

The Board shared a long list of some “highly offensive” comments posted beneath videos of officials’ testimony, including “despicable,” “political puppet,” “bigot,” “pig,” “KKK member,” “clown,” “fraud,” “demonic,” “shill,” “criminal,” and “scumbag.”

The Board acknowledges that committee proceedings are public, but it argues that witnesses did not consent to having their testimony shared on social media, where clips can cause “reputational harm and personal abuse” to officials as well as “risk undermining political debate more generally.”

“When officials are publicly criticised, mocked, berated, or portrayed as personally responsible for policy decisions, the resulting effect can be significantly broader than the experience of the witness alone,” the Board writes. “Such conduct may contribute to a perception that appearing before parliamentary committees carries an unreasonable personal or reputational risk, potentially discouraging capable public servants undertaking public-facing responsibilities.”

Board seeks limits on ‘harmful’ social media clips

The Board is calling on Parliament to provide “guidance,” or more accurately, censorship. In short, it’s clear they want Parliament to consider banning politicians’ use of “harmful” clips from parliamentary hearings on social media — and, in their view, mockery and ridicule are a form of harm.

But, if “Parliament were not inclined to prevent the use of this evidence on social media,” then the Board would like it to consider guidance pressing members of Parliament to share video in full rather than in excerpts, as well as “refrain from content and commentary that targets individual officials for ridicule or harassment,” and disable comments so the general public cannot reply.

Bureaucrats shouldn’t set limits on criticism of bureaucrats

The Secretaries Board does express concerns about threats to public officials after they testified.

But it’s striking how much of the Board’s focus is on ordinary insults, criticism, and mockery by politicians and members of the public responding to videos of hearings. And because the Board is proposing disabling comments, its intent is to limit not just what politicians say about testimony but how ordinary Australians can respond to it.

Sure, ridicule is not a pleasant experience, and it can be miserable and hurtful. There’s no denying that. But satire, parody, mockery, and insult have also long been used by citizens to challenge state power. Treating those methods as harms in themselves in order to justify censorship is itself a threat to a free and open society.

Politicians from a range of parties, including the Greens, Liberals, and One Nation, are objecting to the Board’s proposal. “Bureaucrats shouldn’t get to decide where to draw the line on parliamentary scrutiny, particularly when they’re the ones being scrutinised,” Greens Senator Steph Hodgins-May told The Guardian.

Ridiculing bureaucrats who make and enforce public policy, and are often well-paid in the process, is not a subversion of the democratic process. It is a component of it. If we allow public officials to limit permitted political speech to only what is perceived as “respectful” by those officials, we may find that the real limit is that nothing critical can be said at all.

As First Amendment lawyers, we get asked that quite a bit, sometimes about our clients. The answer is not too hard to figure out. People want to be heard, and social media platforms give them a megaphone.

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Charlie Kirk understood that better than almost anyone. He created a provocative style built for social media and amassed an empire with millions of followers in his tragically short life. So, when he was assassinated on Sept. 10, 2025, his admirers and his critics raced online to say something about it.

What followed was an unprecedented wave of public-employee firings based on social media posts.

One year on, at least 46 of those disputes have been in court, from Florida to Washington State. Tennessee has six. Florida has ten, two of them against the same wildlife agency. Iowa has five. The plaintiffs include teachers, professors, a landscaper, a paramedic who was named medic of the year in 2025, and a public defender who argued before the Iowa Supreme Court days before losing her job.

One concerning trend from these cases deserves special attention: Government employers are vastly overstating the impact of social media posts on their operations. Under the First Amendment, the government may punish an employee for off-the-job speech on a matter of public concern only if it can show that its actual operations were disrupted or if it could reasonably predict that disruption. If the government can’t do either, it’s simply punishing someone for sharing a disfavored opinion. And that appears to be the case of late.

Brittney Brown’s case is a perfect illustration. Brown, a biologist, spent seven years monitoring shorebirds for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. FWC fired her five days after Kirk died over a repost on her private Instagram. When she asked the court to reinstate her, Brown’s supervisor, Melissa Tucker, swore that FWC’s channels received “hundreds of citizen contacts” in two days. The court refused to put Brown back to work while her case proceeded.

Then the lawsuit proceeded to discovery, where the parties exchange information relevant to the claims. Turns out there weren’t “hundreds” of outraged citizens demanding Brown be fired. In fact, Tucker didn’t actually know how many people contacted FWC. FWC’s inspector general documented about 50 emailed complaints, but none from employees, partners, or volunteers. What’s more, a sizable minority were from out of state, and one of those actually complained about FWC’s decision to fire Brown.

By comparison, FWC’s bear hunt the year before drew over 4,000 complaints, some of them threatening. The hunt went on. In other words, Florida used an inflated complaint count to justify terminating an individual for sharing her opinion but had no problem continuing the bear hunt in the face of thousands of real complaints.

In May, Judge Mark Walker struck FWC’s misrepresentations from the record and ordered it to pay attorneys’ fees. Walker found no knowing lie, but sanctioned the government’s refusal to correct the record, which he referred to as “doggedly defend[ing] the indefensible.” And while he acknowledged the false statements were material to his earlier ruling, he concluded that striking them would not have changed the outcome. Ultimately, Florida paid Brown a $485,000 settlement.

“Hundreds of complaints” might sound like disruption, but as Brown’s case demonstrates, the details matter. Are the complaints real? If so, who are they from? Is a “like” on a social media post calling for a public worker to be fired a complaint? Perhaps, but it’s certainly not disruption.

While the volume of terminations is new, the pattern is not. The same kind of outrage has been used to target employees who shared more conservative views. In 2020, social media users expressed outrage over public employees’ views on Black Lives Matter and George Floyd. That outrage often turned into demands to fire the employees.

In Beathard v. Lyons, for example, an Illinois State football coach alleged he was fired after replacing a Black Lives Matter poster on his office door with a sign reading, “All Lives Matter to Our Lord & Savior Jesus Christ.” Sound familiar?

Both then and today, social media has amplified the heckler’s veto, in which the government uses popular opinion or audience reaction to justify censorship. If the government is allowed to cite online mobs when it fires an employee for controversial — but off-the-job — speech, the prevailing mood on social media trumps an individual’s right to speak their mind. In a country that values free speech, that’s the opposite of what we should strive for. The First Amendment protects the most controversial speakers in society, even (and especially) in the face of vehement disagreement. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t mean much.

As with the 2020 cases, some of which are still being litigated, we’re seeing some patterns emerge. Preliminary relief — asking the court for your job back while the case proceeds — has broken almost perfectly along a line that has nothing to do with speech.

Two plaintiffs have won early relief — and they were the only two still on the payroll when they filed their lawsuits. A federal court reinstated Phillip Hook, an art professor, after the South Dakota speaker of the house publicized his post and then called the university himself. While the state board of regents issued a notice of intent to terminate his contract and placed him on administrative leave, the termination had not become final when he sued. Melisa Crook, an Iowa teacher, received a partial injunction barring her school district from terminating her employment over a Facebook post.

Unlike Hook and Crook, every plaintiff who was already fired lost their bid for early reinstatement. But that doesn’t mean that the cases have been losers — quite the opposite. Defendants have mostly failed to get these cases dismissed. At least six plaintiffs survived motions to dismiss, with courts rejecting qualified immunity at least five times. One court dismissed a plaintiff’s lawsuit based on qualified immunity, but she is appealing.

The important question is how little it took to end these careers: a handful of phone calls, a few dozen emails that no one bothered to count, and a couple of days of online anger.

Of the 46 federal cases we’ve found, 29 are still active, 16 have settled, and only one is completely closed. In the ongoing cases, discovery has been the plaintiffs’ best asset because it allows them to see the evidence of disruption (or lack thereof) on which their government employer relied.

The publicly reported settlements demonstrate the cost of censorship. So far, they come to over $4 million. And that’s just the floor because there are very likely other settlements that will never be public.

Surely, some of you reading have little sympathy for the plaintiffs in these cases. You saw their posts, and you asked yourselves the question we opened with: Why would someone post that?

It’s a fair question. It’s not, however, the important one. The important question is how little it took to end these careers: a handful of phone calls, a few dozen emails that no one bothered to count, and a couple of days of online anger.

A year later, early court results show that public employers should stop equating controversial social media posts with workplace disruption. When they do, they erode our deeply ingrained free-speech values, and they upend the lives of hard-working public employees in the process.

You can dislike what someone posts, and you can do so loudly. That’s your First Amendment right. But when the government leverages complaints to fire employees for exercising the same right, that’s not accountability — it’s intolerance, and it’s the state punishing an opinion.

And we are not better off for it.

Jim Watt had become a familiar face at Florida wildlife meetings. A retired turtle farmer, he was often there to raise concerns about the use of pesticides. These public meetings gave citizens a place to do exactly that. By his account, Watt never once raised his voice.

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But in July, The Orlando Sentinel reported that Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation officers have for years used driver’s license records to monitor environmental activists who spoke up at public meetings. The agency says it began using the database to investigate critics after staff received threats. It pulled information for more than 20 people, accessing Watt’s personal information 34 times, even though the agency later said he was never under criminal investigation.

When Watt learned that the agency had been quietly pulling his records, he became afraid to return to the meetings. “When I drive down the road and I see a game warden truck pull up near me,” he says, “I’ve never been afraid of law enforcement in my life, but I am now. I’m afraid.”

The database FWC officials accessed — Florida’s Driver and Vehicle Information Database, or DAVID — is no ordinary system. It’s a restricted government database containing addresses, driver’s license numbers, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, vehicle information, and other sensitive details. In many cases, the reason given for the searches was reportedly “Criminal Investigation.”

The FWC denies misusing or weaponizing its law-enforcement authority, saying the searches were a public-safety measure prompted by threats against commissioners and employees, including over Florida’s black bear hunt. The agency cited a protest outside a commissioner’s business as well as alleged doxxing, and released a collection of hostile social media posts, including one in which the poster said whoever proposed the hunt “should be shot.”

Government officials can investigate credible threats of violence — true threats are not protected by the First Amendment. But angry rhetoric, violent imagery, and ugly political hyperbole do not automatically cross that line. Whether any of the examples the FWC released crossed that line is far from clear. Context matters.

But even if they did, records show that many of the people whose records the agency pulled had not written any of the posts it cited to justify those searches. Instead, many searches took place after someone simply criticized the FWC online or spoke up at a public forum, and the agency had offered no evidence that it ever suspected some of these people were a threat.

Public meetings exist so citizens can question, challenge, and sometimes anger the officials who exercise power over them. That process breaks down when people have to wonder whether criticism will invite government scrutiny.

This is not the FWC’s only recent free-speech controversy either. FIRE recently criticized a broad FWC social media policy that restricted employees’ speech on their personal accounts. The FWC also paid $485,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a former biologist who was fired for reposting a meme on her personal account that claimed Charlie Kirk wouldn’t care about children being shot. These episodes involve different facts, but they sharpen the concern raised here: whether FWC treats criticism as something to tolerate — or something to investigate.

The FWC says Floridians should be able to speak at its meetings and disagree with its commissioners without paying a personal price. Yet Watt learned that, after repeatedly doing just that, agency officials had accessed his personal information 34 times. The FWC has not shown that he threatened anyone or was suspected of a crime. When a law-enforcement agency searches the records of its critics without a clear public-safety justification, it blurs the line between a dissenter and a suspect — and makes speaking up feel risky.

The damage does not stop with the people whose names were searched. Public meetings exist so citizens can question, challenge, and sometimes anger the officials who exercise power over them. That process breaks down when people have to wonder whether criticism will invite government scrutiny. Watt says he is now afraid to return to meetings he once regularly attended and that fear itself is a price. Floridians should not have to choose between criticizing their government and wondering whether their government is quietly looking into them.

Welcome to FIREside, Expression’s weekend companion to the FIREwire. Here you’ll find the previous week’s best essays, films, podcasts, and commentary on free speech.

To keep getting weekend editions for free, select “FIREside” in your subscription settings. You’ll also find the latest editions under Newsletters in the menu at the top of our homepage.

“If you don’t support free speech for people you disagree with, you’re effectively declaring that you cannot come up with a counter-argument that is more compelling.”

— Claire Lehmann, founder and editor of Quillette, writing on X

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Required reading

A cardinal rule of journalism: never back down in the face of intimidation.

Columbia Journalism Review’s Joel Simon has one of the week’s stranger press-freedom stories, in which he explains how ABC is trying to prove that government pressure violated its First Amendment rights by admitting that the pressure worked. In his essay, “Why ABC Self-Censored,” he explains that in a federal lawsuit, ABC says threats and investigations from the FCC changed whom The View booked and even influenced the network’s decision to carry a presidential address it otherwise would not have aired. That makes the suit both a potentially important First Amendment case and an extraordinary confession of editorial self-censorship.

The idea that protecting provocative speech by visitors and immigrants renders the Constitution a “suicide pact” might be one of the most absurd examples of snowflakery I’ve ever seen in my life. Millions of Americans share the views that thousands of student immigrants have expressed, and when you view those ideas as dangerous enough for deportation, we are foolish to believe — just as Jefferson warned — that only immigrants will face the administration’s wrath.

David French — FIRE’s former president — devotes his Wednesday column to the recent federal court ruling in our challenge to the speech-based deportation statutes, and uses it to make the case that the administration’s student-visa crackdown fails on the law, the founding, and even its own stated values.

In the frame

President Trump returned to office in 2025 vowing to defend free speech. In his latest 1AX film, FIRE’s Ronald Baez asks the question: Did the president keep his word?

Worth a listen

The Blessings of Liberty explores constitutional history, Supreme Court debates, and the “American Idea,” hosted by bestselling author and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen.

In this episode, Colleen Shogan, CEO of In Pursuit, joins to discuss a new national initiative. In Pursuit, a More Perfect project, features a set of essays on U.S. presidents and select first ladies. Contributors — including three former presidents, three former first ladies, Chief Justice John Roberts, and seven Pulitzer Prize winners — reflect on each figure to distill a key lesson about the American experiment.

In this week’s Advisory Opinions, “Has the First Amendment Ever Been More Relevant?,” Sarah Isgur and David French discuss FIRE’s court victory over speech-based student deportations, government attempts to control classified information, political expression at school sporting events, and the First Amendment cases that may soon reach the Supreme Court. The FIRE case starts roughly a third of the way in, but the whole episode is an unusually concentrated dose of speech law.

Today in history

By

On Sept. 2, 1642, the Long Parliament shut every theater in London. Officially, it was crowd control. Civil war had broken out, and gatherings were dangerous. But the ordinance gave the game away in its own text, calling plays “Spectacles of Pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious Mirth and Levity,” unfit for a season of fasting and prayer. Puritan reformers had been after the stage for decades, along with mixed dancing, gambling, cosmetics, and fine clothes. The fact that the theater ran Royalist only gave the argument teeth.

The order was meant to be temporary. Plays would cease “while these sad causes and set times of humiliation do continue.” But the alleged sad causes lasted 18 years. By 1648, Parliament had dropped the pretense. Actors were punishable as rogues, playhouse seating ordered torn out, spectators fined for showing up. Raids ran through the decade. Richard Brome’s A Jovial Crew was reportedly the last play legitimately staged before the lights went out. But, of course, drama didn’t die. It merely migrated into dialogue pamphlets that smuggled political arguments onto a printed stage.

In the comments

Ink and opinion

Florida wants colleges out of politics. But…

The board that oversees Florida’s public universities wants them to embrace institutional neutrality, but Ryan Ansloan warns that a carve-out in the proposal allowing schools to “condemn” allegedly unlawful expression could turn a promising policy into yet another license for administrators to weigh in on political disputes.

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A federal judge revives an old American promise

As the Trump administration sought to deport noncitizens over pro-Palestinian expression, FIRE’s victory in Stanford Daily v. Rubio vindicates the old American principle that the government cannot make a person’s presence depend on whether they say the “right” thing. As I wrote this week:

When voices fold into silence, we not only lose their unspoken perspective, we lose touch with what it means to be American, and lose our grip on the very promise of our republic.

Below the fold

• A Minnesota federal case could expose how far Homeland Security went to monitor political dissent — including infiltrating a church where congregants appear to have done nothing more than gather and speak, while agents built dossiers and demanded records from journalists, unions, and activist groups.

International

Chinese officials recently got a Texas conference speaker canceled. You read that right. After Chinese officials confronted a board member of the U.S.-China Catholic Association about Purdue professor Fenggang Yang’s planned appearance at a Houston conference, the group disinvited Yang over his criticism of Beijing. This illustrates how transnational censorship succeeds not merely because authoritarian governments demand silence, Sarah McLaughlin writes, but because institutions in freer countries agree to provide it.

China is prosecuting people for the crime of remembering — Hong Kong convicted longtime organizers of Tiananmen Square vigils, mainland China sentenced artist Gao Zhen to three years for satirical works mocking Mao, and Beijing’s efforts to suppress criticism continue spilling overseas.

Right in its student handbook, Whitman College specifically promises every student freedom of expression and association. So, when members of the Whitman Republican Club sought recognition to become a college-affiliated student organization, they had every reason to expect approval through the same review process as any other group.

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Instead, the student senate unanimously rejected their application. 25-0.

Was it something they had done? Was it something they forgot? No, the record points somewhere else: It was what they believed.

Immediately before the vote, members of the Associated Students of Whitman College’s Senate grilled the club’s representatives about their political views rather than limiting their questions to the club’s organization, constitution, or eligibility. Instead of using viewpoint-neutral criteria, senators asked probing, ideological questions like, “On the 2024 republican party platform subsection 18, what is your club’s take? Will you call the republican party out for things like this?” and “President Trump has made life hard for all international students. When you don’t get affiliated, what is your plan?”

At the end of the discussion, one senator made their objection remarkably explicit: “You can name yourselves whatever you want, but the language of your constitution is in direct contrast to our own constitution. I would suggest that you scrub the title and make a debate club.”

The senators didn’t identify any problem with the group’s application or reason it would not be eligible for recognition. Despite “creating equal and inclusive opportunities” in the ASWC’s own mission, they told the students to scrap their plans, scrub their name, and make their mission more palatable to the senators reviewing it.

This is blatant viewpoint discrimination.

For student organizations, college affiliation is the gateway to requesting funding, hosting events, and legitimacy. Other ideological groups such as Climate Justice Coalition and Planned Parenthood Generation Action enjoy the benefits of affiliation. Instead of giving the WRC its fair shot at gaining college recognition, ASWC senators cornered and prodded the students to justify or criticize specific platforms of a national political party, then denied their recognition for having the “wrong” political views.

It’s not surprising that some or all of the senators found the club’s Republican views offensive. Virtually every viewpoint is offensive to someone. Whitman recognizes dozens of diverse groups on campus, many with missions or purposes that likely conflict with each other or the ASWC: Like Whitman’s affiliated Don’t Eat The Wheat group, who may have some conflicting values with the also-affiliated Cooking and Baking Club. But to deny one club based on its view threatens the same rights of all groups. If dissent leads to exclusion, what happens to any viewpoint that disagrees with the majority?

In the past, prohibitions on viewpoint discrimination have protected groups whose views were not popular when they sought to form campus organizations. For example, the principle of viewpoint neutrality protected chapters of LGBT organizations in Arkansas and New Hampshire in the 1970s and ’80s when student senates and university trustees refused to “support a homosexual group” or their expression, which was considered “shocking and offensive” at the time. Using only viewpoint-neutral criteria means that voices that may not be popular can still be heard.

No one expects the ASWC — or anyone, for that matter — to wholeheartedly agree with every ideological group on campus. But everyone should expect that it will not deny an ideological group because its views are unpopular or offensive. Without viewpoint neutrality, the benefits of college affiliation are withheld from some groups, purely based on their beliefs.

Though Whitman is a private school, and so not directly governed by the First Amendment, it voluntarily promises students freedom of speech, expression, and association. And the ASWC, as an elected student body, is also obligated to uphold those promises.

The ASWC proved that their “discretion” is more of a popularity contest with senators’ own ideological preferences. When the WRC applies for recognition again, Whitman College must ensure that club recognition is instead a fair and viewpoint-neutral process. And if the ASWC again fails to use neutral criteria, Whitman must intervene and grant WRC’s affiliation. Anything less is an egregious violation of the very free speech principles that Whitman prides itself on touting.

Last week, Polk State College proudly announced that its Board of Trustees had adopted a statement committing the school to institutional neutrality. On Sept. 3, the State University System of Florida’s Board of Governors will consider taking the first formal step toward requiring all 12 universities in the system to adopt institutional-neutrality policies of their own.

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On the whole, that’s good news. Institutional neutrality can help colleges remain focused on their educational mission while leaving political and social debates to students and faculty.

But both the Polk State policy and the proposal before the Board of Governors contain a significant loophole. Rather than hew to the clear and rare exceptions used by many schools that have adopted institutional neutrality, these policies provide a new exception that threatens to render the neutrality commitment meaningless. Unless Florida fixes this defect, FIRE cannot treat these policies as the kind of institutional neutrality commitments we recommend to colleges and universities.

Polk State framed the move as part of new President Anastasios Kamoutsas’s “vision for his first 90 days as president” and as part of a broader tapestry of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s statewide education initiatives. The college even included a quote from Governor DeSantis, celebrating the adoption and touting Florida’s commitment to “free speech and open inquiry” in higher education and framing this as a strike against “echo chambers.”

That instinct is sound.

Institutional neutrality is the idea that universities should not, as institutions, take formal positions on social and political issues, instead leaving those discussions to members of the campus community. The concept was formalized at the University of Chicago in 1967 when a committee chaired by legal scholar Harry Kalven Jr. released its “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action,” now known simply as the “Kalven Report.”

The Kalven Report has become an important template for schools seeking to make their own commitment to institutional neutrality. FIRE urges colleges and universities to adopt institutional neutrality, and 50 of them have formally done just that.

When FIRE analyzes universities’ approaches to institutional neutrality, to decide whether to include them on our list of formal adoptions, we are determining if the school has formally adopted an “official position of institutional neutrality substantially similar to the principles set forth in the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report.”

Not every policy carrying the label passes the test. Some lack an important component of Kalven. Others add language that risks swallowing the principles. Polk State’s policy and the similar approach being considered by the State University System of Florida’s Board of Governors fall into the latter category.

Polk State and the Board’s proposal get much of this right. The new policy says the college and its operating units generally will not take official positions on matters unrelated to the institution’s mission and operations.

Then comes the problem.

The Kalven Report is clear that only in rare circumstances is it acceptable for the university to overcome “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day.” According to Kalven, that exception comes into play for threats to the “very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.”

Polk State says the college may nevertheless “speak out when an issue is in violation of the law, affects its educational purpose, how it operates, or the safety of students, faculty, and staff.”

The Board of Governors’ proposal contains a similar exception. It would require each university’s policy to provide that institutional neutrality does not prevent university representatives from “publicly addressing, condemning, or prohibiting expressions or actions that violate the law.” The same proposal separately allows institutional statements when an issue bears materially and directly on the university’s core mission.

That second exception is enough. The first is a fatal defect.

Of course a university may enforce the law. Institutional neutrality does not require administrators to ignore vandalism, violence, unlawful harassment, true threats, or other illegal conduct. Nor does neutrality prevent a university from telling its community what rules apply, explaining an arrest on campus, closing a building for safety reasons, or otherwise carrying out its ordinary responsibilities.

But enforcing the law is different from institutionally condemning conduct. The former is an operational responsibility. The latter is an institutional judgment. And once “this violates the law” becomes an independent justification for institutional speech, the boundaries of neutrality become remarkably unclear.

We can only speculate how administrators at Polk State, as well as schools across the Florida State System, will determine “when an issue is in violation of the law.” Is it enough that a state legislature is considering adopting a law? Or that someone is accused of violating a law? Or that the Supreme Court is considering a matter? Or that a country is accused by some of violating international law?

If the answer to any of those questions is yes, this carve-out could allow Polk State — a small public college in Winter Haven, Florida — to offer comments on everything from trans high school athletes in Idaho and the ongoing Lindsay Clancy trial in Massachusetts to President Trump’s White House ballroom and, of course, where the college stands on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For the sake of Polk State’s reputation — and the sanity of its communications department — hopefully the college has no intention of offering comments on any of the above matters and will instead follow the Kalven Report’s vision of institutional neutrality. But policies should be written to constrain the next administration too, including one far more eager to speak.

The Kalven Report got the basic principle right nearly 60 years ago. Universities exist to foster disagreement, not resolve political disputes in the institution’s name. They must sometimes speak to protect their ability to perform that mission. But they do not need a free-floating power to condemn whatever administrators have determined to be illegal.

Florida has the right destination in mind. But before it can actually call this policy neutral, it needs to close the loophole.

In the summer of 1798, Congress gave the president the power to expel any foreigner he personally judged dangerous. Though the president never used the Alien Friends Act, and it expired two years later, it had its intended result. French printers, teachers, and booksellers sold their belongings and took ship out of Philadelphia, rather than wait to find out if the president had them in mind. Thomas Jefferson later argued that to put such power in the hands of one person is the very definition of despotism.

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Last Friday, a federal court in California reminded us of this in Stanford Daily v. Rubio, in which Judge Noël Wise held the government cannot deport people for their opinions. The court held that the two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that Secretary of State Marco Rubio invokes in trying to do so violate the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment when used to target protected speech. The first provision FIRE challenged lets the secretary of state cancel anyone’s visa, at any time, for any reason. The second lets him deport anyone over protected speech so long as he “personally determines” the speech “compromises a compelling United States foreign policy interest.”

After the Trump administration began targeting people for pro-Palestinian speech, The Stanford Daily saw multiple staff reporters and editors refuse to cover the war in Gaza out of fear of being deported. Some even quit the paper rather than take the risk of doing journalism in such a climate. Their fear was not without reason. The government had already arrested and detained for deportation multiple people for daring to voice their opinions on one of the most widely discussed issues in recent history.

Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student studying the positive uses of social media by adolescents, became deeply troubled by what she read about the war in Gaza, so she decided to co-author an op-ed in her student paper calling on Tufts University to divest from companies tied to Israel. Mahmoud Khalil, who had studied international relations as a Columbia grad student, took part in pro-Palestinian protests and characterized Palestinian actions as “armed resistance, which is legitimate under international law.” Mohsen Mahdawi, who had been recently accepted into the same program as Khalil, blamed Israel for the Oct. 7 attacks and said he does not justify such violence, but empathizes with Hamas.

These views may offend many who hear them, just as they may gain instant agreement from others. This is how the marketplace of ideas is supposed to work. President Jefferson understood this. He took the oath in 1801, after an election so vicious that Federalists had warned a Jefferson presidency would burn the churches and end the republic itself. His own allies were jailed under the Sedition Act for the crime of criticizing the government. Yet in his wisdom, delivering his inaugural address, he turned to the very people who thought him the enemy of constitutional order and asked that they be left to stand undisturbed, as “monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

The three students identified above were all pursuing academic study in America and expressing opinions on a widely debated topic. Their right to do this without punishment for stating their views is not only a testament to American freedom, but to the distinctly American tradition of intellectual resilience that does not merely tolerate differences of opinion, but recognizes in them an opportunity, and holds fast to the belief that we can be made better by hearing them, even if we think they’re wrong. Yet for their thoughtcrimes, all three were arrested and nearly removed from the country.

As a result, Stanford Daily reporters on student visas began turning down assignments about the Middle East. Not just opinion pieces, mind you, but reporting work. Now multiply that by every campus paper, every graduate seminar, every noncitizen who has an informed view about a place they actually come from, or simply a different opinion about whatever might be in the news that week. What you end up with is public conversation in America with a conspicuous hole in the middle.

Nor was the Daily alone in the lawsuit. A second plaintiff, participating under a Jane Doe pseudonym, with no connection to the paper or the school, also felt the chill and simply stopped going to protests. She stopped wearing a keffiyeh. She decided it was wiser to surrender the expression of her own beliefs than to risk the wrath of a censorial government. Her story should remind us that censorship is most effective when it need not be enforced, but rather operates on the mind of the victim before an offending idea is ever given voice. And more is lost than just her opinion. When voices fold into silence, we not only lose their unspoken perspective, we lose touch with what it means to be American, and lose our grip on the very promise of our republic.

We are a country made great in no small measure by more than two centuries of welcoming brilliant minds from abroad. Add to this that there was once something deeply American about taking pride in saying the unpopular thing, and saying it loud. Now we find ourselves telling visitors that they had better watch what they say, or simply keep their thoughts to themselves, lest they bruise our fragile sensibilities and lose their right to remain in the country.

Thankfully, last week’s ruling places the First Amendment back at the forefront. Meanwhile, Khalil’s and Mahdawi’s cases are still working their way through the system. But we are at least now turning in the right direction. A noble principle, once commonly held, is coming back into view. As Judge Wise said in her ruling, “You can simultaneously hate the content of a person’s speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it.”

Free Speech Dispatch covers censorship trends and challenges around the world. If you want to know where free expression is under attack and why it matters, subscribe now to get each edition delivered to your inbox.

What’s past is prologue — and talking about it might be a crime. Many of the stories I discuss in the Free Speech Dispatch address fresh cases of censorship of speech about things that are happening now: dissenters opposing a new government policy, reporters investigating uncovered corruption, protest movements suddenly flourishing, etc. But governments are sometimes just as sensitive about the past as they are the present. Today’s edition leads off with a look at Hong Kong and China, where activists and an artist were recently prosecuted for their retrospection and discussion of China’s past — warts and all. And be warned: this repression leaks outside the borders of China and Hong Kong and into freer nations.

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Tiananmen memorial activists and Mao artist convicted

Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung, who led the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China and organized annual Tiananmen massacre memorials in Hong Kong, could now face a decade in prison. They were found guilty in court late last month and convicted under Hong Kong’s national security law. The alliance’s call to “end one-party dictatorship,” the panel of three judges asserted, constituted an attempt to unlawfully overthrow the Chinese Communist Party.

Politicians and civil society groups around the world condemned the decision, and Hong Kong authorities are now objecting to what they deem “baseless slander and smearing” from anti-China critics. “Members of the public should not be misled by the external forces’ attempts to smear, but must be able to distinguish between right and wrong, and clearly understand the difference between this case and the normal situation regarding the exercise of freedoms of association, assembly and speech,” a spokesman for the government said.

In mainland China, the situation is also grim. Gao Zhen, a Chinese artist and U.S. permanent resident, will spend three years in prison for “infringing upon the reputation of heroes.” The criminal conduct? Satirical works of art, including “Mao’s Guilt,” a sculpture of Mao Zedong kneeling in repentance. The law against insulting heroes was passed after Gao created these works. Gao’s wife had prepared his clothes, hoping and expecting that he would be released. But now she must return to the United States, and their family, alone. Comedian Guo Degang joins Gao in similar trouble. The popular comedian is facing show cancellations — and police investigation — after revising the lyrics to revolutionary song “Playing My Beloved Pipa” in a performance.

And there are, yet again, accusations that Chinese officials are attempting to chill speech outside the country, too. This summer, protesters held a vigil for Lobga Rangzen, the Tibetan activist who self immolated by the UN’s New York headquarters, outside the Chinese embassy in London. Footage from the vigil shows guards inside the embassy brandishing stun weapons — which are illegal in the UK — at protesters yelling outside the gates. Four years ago, staff at Manchester’s Chinese consulate dragged and beat a protester who held a sign mocking Xi Jinping.

It’s even in the United States. As I wrote about earlier this week, Chinese officials pressured a U.S.-based Catholic group to disinvite a speaker who studies state regulation of religion from a conference in Texas this summer. And they agreed to do so.

Will Palestine Action’s terrorist designation import UK censorship?

Last week, the Trump administration designated the UK-based Palestine Action as a terror organization, meaning it will face financial and other sanctions from the U.S. government. Reporting from The Telegraph and The Times suggests that pro-Palestine Action demonstrators who were arrested in the UK in recent months under Section 12 of the UK’s Terrorism Act 2000 — which bars expressing “opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation” — may be denied entry to the United States. Unlike British law, the First Amendment draws a distinction between materially supporting groups proscribed by the government and simply expressing words and ideas about those groups.

If the designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization results in the United States denying entry to British grandmothers who were arrested for peacefully holding signs in a public park, America will be bringing the UK’s censorship onto our shores. At a time when the United States rightfully criticizes the UK for its immense failures on freedom of expression, we must reject that censorship — not import it.

New Zealand joins the social media ban campaign

Another domino threatens to fall. This time it’s in New Zealand, where Parliament is set to consider a bill forcing social media platforms to take steps to keep kids offline. The proposed ban would require platforms including Facebook and TikTok to enact measures to ensure teens under 16 are walled out or face major fines, potentially “substantially higher” than in Australia. As FIRE has explained before, Australia’s landmark ban has effectively been a failure. Not only are kids still using social media, but the tools governments have used to try to keep them out have created massive new privacy and censorship risks — including for adults.

Mexico weighs new demands on TV and radio broadcasts

A new proposal put forth by President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration is raising fresh concerns about media censorship in Mexico. Under the proposed guidelines from the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, TV and radio broadcasters would be required to make a number of changes to respect “audience rights.” Among those changes, which would be enforced by the commission, are that broadcasters would need to put up tags clarifying what content is news and what is opinion, the installation of ombudsmen to address audience complaints, and a guaranteed right of reply to audiences in response to coverage they deem false.

Sydney library returns ‘How to Sell a Genocide’ to shelves

A library in the same council area as Bondi Beach in Sydney took Adam Johnson’s 2026 book How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza from shelves after a survivor of last year’s Bondi Beach terror attack said the book’s presence was upsetting to victims and the bereaved. But the book is now back after the State Library of New South Wales wrote to remind Waverly Library that it can retain controversial material on its shelves. “The library acknowledges that some books and materials may not align with everyone’s personal views, experiences or beliefs, but supports the right of individuals to make their own choices about what they read, view and access,” the State Library said in a statement.

The danger of online expression in Pakistan

TikTok creator Shamso Bibi was murdered last month, shot dead by two men as she traveled in a car with her family. Bibi had 1.3 million followers on TikTok. Her family suspects she was killed by men with whom she had a financial dispute and who wanted “to silence her and take her money.” She apparently joins at least nine other women content creators killed in the past year or so in Pakistan, often by men offended at content they posted online. One man reportedly murdered four relatives for posting “indecent” on TikTok. Activists warn that the killings expose the heightened risks women in Pakistan face when using the internet to express themselves to broader audiences.

There’s another risk to online speech, too: “cyber-blasphemy.” Families of the accused are pushing the government to look into their allegations that a network is intentionally entrapping people into blasphemy cases online to extort them, given the risk of long prison sentences and even mob violence against accused blasphemers. The existence of “cyber-blasphemy” is a disturbing, if fascinating, insight into how much things change but how much they stay the same when it comes to free speech. Modern technology meets perhaps the most ancient of speech restrictions.

Tourist jailed for insulting sacred holiday in Bali

It’s an ugly reality tourists occasionally learn from time to time: Being on vacation in another country does not mean you are also on vacation from that country’s laws. Such was the case for Luzian Andrin Zgraggen, a Swiss tourist sentenced to prison late last month in Bali. Zgraggen was arrested in March after posting an Instagram video of himself using expletives to complain about Nyepi, the Day of Silence, a sacred Balinese Hindu observance during which businesses and events shut down on the island and residents usually stay at home.

Zgraggen apologized at his trial, expressing that he did not intend to insult the Balinese people, but was nevertheless sentenced to one year in prison. The presiding judge said he “offended the Balinese people, hurt their faith and provoked public outrage.”

‘Discredit’ the military, spend over a decade in prison

Russia continues to enact harsh punishments on critics of the war in Ukraine, particularly under laws banning “discrediting” or spreading misinformation about the armed forces. Last month, a Pskov court sentenced war critic and politician Lev Shlosberg to 11 years and one month in prison for comments about the war in a YouTube debate and a Telegram repost. In a separate case, his party, Yabloko, was also banned from participating in upcoming elections. “A single person is imprisoned, yet fear seeps into the hearts of millions,” Shlosberg said in closing remarks at his trial.

Europe’s top human rights court calls for political prisoner’s release

In a 15-2 ruling, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights issued a clear statement: Activist, businessman, and philanthropist Mehmet Osman Kavala must be freed. Part of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s crackdown on dissent in the aftermath of the 2016 failed coup, Kavala was first arrested by Turkish authorities in 2017, acquitted in 2020, but then prosecuted again and sentenced to life in prison. The Grand Chamber found that the Turkish government’s actions against Kavala were “predominantly motivated” by a desire to punish him “for expressing his opinions as a human-rights defender, and to silence him,” and constituted violations of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In the United States, campus speakers, online expression, blockbuster movies, and printed books are all, of course, protected by the First Amendment. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re protected against influence and censorship by foreign powers, particularly the Chinese government. This censorship may go under the radar for many Americans, but make no mistake: It can influence not just what you encounter in the secular world, but maybe the spiritual one, too.

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A report this week from the National Catholic Register paints a disturbing picture: A U.S.-based Catholic organization chose to disinvite a speaker from its conference at the University of St. Thomas in Houston after facing direct pressure from Chinese officials. Apparently even the speaker lists at religious events in the U.S. cannot escape pressure from foreign officials who vest in themselves the authority to censor the world.

How a small Texas conference became a target

This time last year, the U.S.-China Catholic Association (USCCA) invited Purdue University professor and director of the Center on Religion and the Global East Fenggang Yang to speak at USCCA’s summer 2026 conference in Houston. Yang agreed to deliver what he called a “very non-political” speech, “Transforming Guanxi: Chinese Christian Transnational Ties and the Making of Social and Spiritual Capital.”

Yang, who was born in China, says his academic work on state regulation of religion — a long-brewing issue between the Vatican and the Chinese government — at one point was well received by Chinese officials. But, with the rise of Xi Jinping and growing repression within the country, state authorities have increasingly censored Yang’s work in the past decade. Enough so, it seems, that they sought to limit his ability to speak not just in China, but in the United States.

That brings us to May of this year, when chair of the USCCA board Peter Tan contacted Yang out of the blue to tell him that the two needed to talk, as Tan “just returned from China,” where he “was confronted by two government officials regarding your participation in our conference.” The two spoke over Zoom, where Tan asked Yang to step down but gave little detail.

Yang declined to self-censor, so Tan made the decision for him: To “protect the future of the USCCA,” Yang was no longer welcome to speak.

Why did a U.S. Catholic group bend the knee?

Tan offered a number of reasons.

The University of St. Thomas and the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston would “most likely ask us to cancel the conference,” Tan said, because he had to ensure that “we will not be in conflict with the Vatican’s position on the PRC or jeopardize the Vatican.” (The Register reports that, in a comment, the university said it did not make any requests regarding the conference and the archdiocese did not respond in time for publication.) Tan also worried that board members feared retaliation from Yang’s participation. “The bottom line is no one can predict what the government can and will do. There is too much risk,” Tan wrote.

In a June 29 letter, chair of the 2026 USCCA conference Father Rob Carbonneau and Tan wrote to Yang offering further explanation: Two officials from the State Administration for Religious Affairs called for Yang’s removal due to his “past public criticism of the Chinese government.”

The board deemed it necessary to “preserve the USCCA’s fragile, long-term presence and mission in China.” One board member, University of California, San Diego professor Richard Madsen, did not agree and resigned, objecting to this “violation of the freedom of speech that is essential to academic integrity.”

Yang, too, objected, including to the USCCA’s request that he keep this matter quiet. “I cannot promise to be silent about this whole thing,” Yang wrote. “The egregious violation of religious freedom and academic freedom, and your organization’s willing cooperation in it, need to be exposed.” He also called the group’s “willingness” to assist in transnational repression “disappointing and hurtful.”

In a comment to The Register, Tan said critics need to understand that his group is not a “human rights organization.”

Sometimes, it takes two to censor

“I think it really represents an escalation,” Yang told The Register about his cancellation by USCCA. “They are trying to censor me on American soil.” He’s right — and he’s not alone. As I chronicled in my book Authoritarians in the Academy, critics of the Chinese government face censorship, threats, and fear in U.S. higher education and beyond.

But that’s only half the story. The other half is those who are willing to assist with that censorship and comply with orders from officials seeking to exert power beyond their own jurisdiction. People who find themselves in that situation, where they are pressured to consent to censorship abroad on behalf of an authoritarian power, no doubt often face a difficult choice. But it is, nevertheless, a choice.

Americans must ask themselves uncomfortable questions about what else foreign powers quietly censor on our shores without our notice, and why it’s so difficult for tech companies, civil society institutions, universities, and even religious groups to clearly and resolutely say “no” to those efforts.

How can we fight for a more just and free world if we aren’t even willing to embrace, defend, and employ our own freedoms in the process?

This essay was originally published by Reason on Aug. 27, 2026.

Later today, a federal judge in Minneapolis will hear a motion for discovery in the Minnesota 15 antifa case. If granted, it could eventually reveal just how far the tentacles of the Trump administration’s vast surveillance, harassment, and intimidation campaign against its critics in Minnesota reached — and how much of it continues today.

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In mid-June, the federal government unsealed an eight-count indictment against 15 activists for allegedly interfering, sometimes violently, with the federal immigration crackdown that roiled the Twin Cities last winter, during which federal agents shot and killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti. One of those indicted, Isaac Sant, faces two counts: conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer and interstate stalking.

Sant will have his day in court, and if the case goes to trial, a jury will decide whether the government has proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt. But as he and his attorney mount a defense, they have filed a motion for discovery accusing the federal government of “an unprecedented campaign by DHS (Department of Homeland Security) to spy on Minnesotans,” based on the government’s own initial disclosures.

Alleging that his prosecution is the result of a political witch hunt based on First-Amendment-protected activity, Sant and his attorney, Kevin C. Riach, are asking a federal court in Minnesota to force the government to release any and all communications and materials related to the charges Sant faces. (Earlier this week, Protect Democracy filed an amicus brief in support of Sant’s discovery motion on behalf of the Cato Institute, the Society for the Rule of Law, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.)

What has already been revealed in this case conjures up the ghosts of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R–Wisc.) and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. At the center of it all is Homeland Security Investigations, the DHS’ principal criminal investigative arm, which is acting more like a domestic spy agency than a law enforcement agency bound by the Constitution.

During last winter’s Operation Metro Surge, undercover HSI agents surveilled and infiltrated meetings at churches, parks, libraries, schools, and union halls and gained access to encrypted Signal chats under initiatives dubbed “Operation Keyhole,” “Operation Puppet Master,” and “Project Whipple Shield.”

In one incident in February, an undercover agent wormed their way into a meeting at the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Roseville, Minnesota, a suburb bordering the Twin Cities. The undercover agent recorded the license plates of activists opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity and then matched the plates to their owners, creating dossiers that included names, photos, addresses, and even more intimate details, such as information about their families and employment.

“None of these individuals did anything other than engage in First Amendment speech in a church meeting room,” wrote Riach in the discovery motion. “Yet now their personal information is memorialized in a DHS dossier.”

During a recent service at the church, interim pastor Steve Sylvester told his congregation that the federal government had surveilled the church last winter. “It feels weird,” Sylvester told NPR. “It feels like I’m living in 1950s Eastern Europe.” Sylvester’s church wasn’t the only one under watch in this American remake of The Lives of Others.

In May, another undercover agent wore a wire to a training held at University Baptist Church in Minneapolis and hosted by Left Jab, a lefty mixed martial arts club dedicated to “community self-defense.” The surveillance led to some black comedy. “Due to the physicality of the event,” reads the HSI report of investigation, the undercover agent’s “concealed body-worn audio recorder erroneously fell to the floor of the gymnasium near the end of the training. UCA–5022 briefly left the gymnasium, realized she no longer had the device, and returned to the gymnasium to retrieve the device from the floor.”

But Cody Sanders, interim pastor of University Baptist, wasn’t laughing. “I do imagine people will look over their shoulder a little more and wonder, ‘Is there someone here who’s trying to gather information?’ Or when they see a strange car in the parking lot,” Sanders told NPR. “I hope we can resist the kind of suspicion that this is likely to generate.”

But that’s a feature, not a bug, of these kinds of police-state tactics. Revelations like these supercharge the corrosive power of paranoia, making people fear that something they say or someone they associate with could land them in a federal database. Constitutional rights don’t mean much if you’re afraid to exercise them.

The authoritarian tactics, however, don’t stop there. Bypassing judicial scrutiny, HSI issued administrative summonses and subpoenas targeting the financial records of labor unions and progressive nonprofits. Without the organizations’ knowledge, the agency sought more than three years’ worth of records from the Service Employees International Union, Communications Workers of America, and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. They also sought financial records from the Sunrise Movement and Voices for Racial Justice, both progressive groups.

The federal government itself ties this investigation to National Security Presidential Memorandum–7 (NSPM–7). In HSI’s own report of investigation, the synopsis states plainly that the investigation at Prince of Peace church was opened in “accordance with” the memorandum.

Issued by President Donald Trump after the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, NSPM–7 explicitly places political beliefs within its domestic terrorism framework. The policy directive describes “anti-fascism” as an umbrella under which “violent and terroristic activities” occur and lists beliefs such as “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” as well as what it calls “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” as among the “common threads” animating violent conduct. It then tasks the national and local Joint Terrorism Task Forces with coordinating and supervising “a comprehensive national strategy” and directs the Justice Department to pursue prosecutions.

In her December memo implementing NSPM–7, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi addressed civil liberties concerns in a footnote. “The United States Government does not investigate, collect, or maintain information on U.S. persons solely for the purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment,” the second footnote reads. “No investigation may be opened based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment or the lawful exercise of rights secured by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

When NSPM–7 was issued, civil liberties organizations such as FIRE warned that the policy directive and its implementation would likely lead to the feds investigating government critics for First Amendment-protected activities absent any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. That prediction is now unfortunately coming true, despite the government’s assurances it wouldn’t cross the line.

In the months and years ahead, activists, journalists, lawyers, and legislators will try to get to the bottom of NSPM-7’s vast surveillance apparatus. Time will tell how many Americans were swept into these programs without evidence of wrongdoing and how many were chilled from exercising their rights to free speech and association.

This discovery motion is one of the first attempts to help uncover the truth.

Welcome to FIREside, Expression’s companion to the FIREwire. Here you’ll find all the previous week’s major essays, films, podcasts, and commentary on free speech.

To keep getting weekend editions for free, click the link below and select “FIREside.” You’ll also find the latest editions under Newsletters in the menu at the top of our homepage.

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“It represents the free thought and free expression of a free people.”

— Gen. George C. Marshall, on Stars and Stripes

Required reading

Atlantic writer James Loeffler returns to Charlottesville nine years on, arguing that the choice between protecting speech and protecting equal rights is a false one — but that Americans keep making it because we have no shared vocabulary for such hatred.

When hatred does not fit existing categories, we tend either to ignore it or to overcorrect—both responses that distort the boundaries of free expression. Our failure to reckon with the anti-Semitism of Charlottesville—on the right and the left—was not merely a missed opportunity. It helped create the opening into which illiberalism has since rushed.

New York editor Michael Calderone interviewed Erik Slavin the day before he sued the Pentagon, apparently for saying the government shouldn’t censor the news. Slavin:

The separation notice states that this was so egregious that they weren’t going to consider lesser punishments, which they’re allowed to do under the regulations they have, and yet they waited about five weeks to do it.

The Dallas County jail bans magazines, newspapers, and paperbacks for any prisoner with tablet access, which is nearly all of them. Prison Legal News editor Paul Wright writes in the Dallas Morning News that he sued over the same policy back in 2007, and won a decree promising it wouldn’t happen again. But it started back up in 2022, and now he’s moved for contempt.

Schools and libraries ban books based on content, but the public and students can still buy or access them elsewhere. That isn’t so for prisoners, who cannot access the publications at all.

In the frame

President Trump returned to office in 2025 vowing to defend free speech. In his latest 1AX film, FIRE’s Ronald Baez asks the question: Did the president keep his word?

Worth a listen

So to Speak takes an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define free speech — hosted by FIRE’s Nico Perrino.

In this episode, Joel Thayer of the America First Policy Institute and Kate Ruane of the Center for Democracy & Technology debate whether algorithms count as speech — covering design features, Section 230, COPPA, and whether an AI chatbot has anything like a First Amendment interest.

The Blessings of Liberty explores constitutional history, Supreme Court debates, and the “American Idea,” hosted by bestselling author and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen.

In this episode, historian Ted Widmer joins to discuss his new book The Living Declaration, tracing the origins of the Declaration of Independence, where its ideas came from, and why they kept getting borrowed.

Today in history with

On Aug. 26, 1789, during the French Revolution, the National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The initial drafts came from the Marquis de Lafayette, who had fought in the American Revolution, in consultation with Thomas Jefferson. Abbé Sieyès and Mirabeau shaped the final text. Article 11 boldly calls the free communication of ideas one of the most precious rights of man.

Louis XVI ratified it that October, and it became the preamble to the 1791 constitution. Flouted by many revolutionaries and superseded twice in the 1790s, it outlasted them anyway. Indeed, the French constitutions in 1852, 1946, and 1958 were built on its ideas. Vive l’expression.

In the comments

The FIREwire is a weekly news roundup of the biggest stories involving free speech, as well as reports, essays, fresh data, and original analysis.

A note: starting this week, the FIREwire will only contain headline news and data. For essays, movies, podcasts, history, online debates, and reader comments, please see our new weekend edition, FIREside, arriving Saturdays.

Pentagon fires Stars and Stripes editor

The Pentagon fired Stars and Stripes editor-in-chief Erik Slavin for “insubordination” days after he told CBS he would not run a Pentagon-written story in place of an accurate one. It then fired publisher Max Lederer and reporter Lara Korte too.

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As Jacob Gaba reports, the firings capped a year of quieter work. In January, the Defense Department pulled the decades-old regulation requiring the paper operate freely, and a March memo expanded departmental oversight over editorial decisions.

In Vietnam, one senior officer’s standing complaint about Stripes had been that its reporters asked questions. It seems little has changed.

Below the fold

• A federal appeals court ruled that a New Hampshire district likely violated the First Amendment by punishing parents who wore pink “XX” wristbands to protest a trans player being fielded on the opposing high school soccer team.

• A Nebraska student’s cartoon criticized ICE, his school district pulled it, and when FIRE objected, they put the whole newsroom under prior review.

• Massachusetts has a new law requiring due process before a complaint can get a library book removed. Wicked good move, Mass.

• A Michigan city won’t give FIRE the Facebook posts that had its commissioners threatening to sue residents, calling them too “emotionally offensive” to release.

• The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says online ads can now be used to track journalists, map their contacts, and expose their sources.

Around the world

Britain keeps prosecuting blasphemy without having a blasphemy law. As Sarah McLaughlin reports, retired police officer Stephen Gray was fined more than £1,000 for reposting a Facebook meme mocking Muslims over child marriage, while Hamit Coskun, who burned a Quran and was attacked in the street for it, beat the resulting charge only after an arrest, a conviction, and two appeals. Britain doesn’t need blasphemy laws when the process is the punishment.

• Russia fined Meduza’s exiled editor Ivan Kolpakov for “participating in the activities of an undesirable organization.” Namely, the newsroom he runs.

• Bangladesh will keep three journalists jailed until trial for crimes against humanity because they asked then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina about student protests in 2024, and she answered by likening protesters to the traitors who sided with Pakistan against Bangladeshi independence — an insult that set off riots killing up to 1,400, drove her into exile under a death sentence, and may result in three journalists being hanged for asking the question in the first place.

• Congo’s M23 rebels banned media in the east they control from debating politics or covering the national government, and suspended Bukavu FM host Claude Kashonga for 45 days after he criticized rebels for seizing private homes.

• Vietnam passed a publishing law this week, effective March 2027, redefining publishing as a technology industry and requiring AI labels for digital work.

Tech

A federal judge ruled the Pentagon’s “supply chain risk” label on Anthropic — imposed after the company refused to drop its weapons and surveillance guardrails — was unlawful First Amendment retaliation.

Also this week, Meta’s roughly $17 billion child-safety settlement brings curfews to teen accounts and age checks to everyone else’s.

By the numbers

12%. That’s the share of sanctioned scholars who told FIRE their careers ultimately came out ahead — and even they described the experience as hell, including days without sleep and an inability to think about anything else. The other 88% got the version without the upside, and a new FIRE survey of over 200 faculty plus two dozen interviews finds the damage is rarely just professional.

A professor can survive an online mob. What can change a career is what happens when a university decides to join it.

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Over the past quarter century, almost 2,000 scholars have faced sanctions over their speech, with more than 300 of these campaigns resulting in termination or forced resignation. A recent FIRE survey of more than 200 faculty members found that many scholars targeted for their speech experience lasting professional and personal consequences. Many feel betrayed by colleagues and institutions designed to protect them and resent their abandonment. This post draws on over two dozen semi-structured interviews with professors who participated in FIRE’s survey aggregating scholars’ individual sanction narratives into a larger portrait of the contemporary university.

Two initial conclusions from these interviews are clear. First, no targeted scholar emerges unscathed — professional, social, or psychological consequences appear in all interviews. Second, scholars themselves draw an important distinction between being sanctioned (internal, official) and being canceled (external, unofficial).

In only 12% of cases did an academic say their careers ultimately benefited from the targeting. But even those scholars described the experience as intensely unpleasant.

“I had all these great things happen after,” one scholar said. But, the person added, “in the middle of things, it was very stressful and disturbing and stuff.”

Another scholar said, “I think professionally, I probably gained more than I lost in the end,” adding, “the whole thing made me stronger,” but only after “a very intense psychological reaction” that included days without sleep and an inability to think about much else.

A scholar who described their sanctioning as professionally “elevating” still called it “emotionally difficult” and “a hard thing to go through,” remembering the early days as “hellish.”

For others, the professional consequences did not fade. One scholar who faced backlash after publishing an essay said that being placed on a Turning Point USA watchlist coincided with a sharp decline in speaking invitations: “What I have noticed, since I was on the list, my speaking engagements have radically dropped.”

Financial consequences were a common concern among both cancelled and sanctioned academics.

But the interviews also showed why faculty were clear to distinguish sanction from cancellation. One interviewee, asked to discuss the event that got them sanctioned, immediately objected: “I haven’t been sanctioned.” Emphasizing that they had never faced official institutional punishment, they instead described the experience as being “targeted” or “canceled.”

Another scholar who has had at least one hairy run-in with his university offered a similar definition: “I hear the word sanction as being some sort of official [disciplining].”

Sanctions are particularly virulent to intellectual expression because they make a scholar vulnerable by removing institutional safeguards and encouraging non-collegial behavior. As the target of a cancellation-cum-(failed) sanction said, “I think there was just plain underlying academic jealousy” and “just this oversized reaction,” and that colleagues seemed to hold the sentiment that they were “finally going to punish” this scholar “for everything that has built up for the last two decades.”

Reflecting during the interview, this interviewee realized other members of their department removed them from Covid-era Zoom department meetings. However, even if the scholar had noticed their exclusion at the time, who would they have turned to for help? The university issuing press releases condemning them? The vulnerability of a sanctioned scholar cannot be understated. Another academic told a story of having their teaching interrupted so an adjunct faculty member from their department could “scream” at them that they “shouldn’t even be at this university.”

Sometimes, the cause for sanction, targeting, or cancellation are sufficiently carcinogenic to free inquiry on their own. Although a cancelled professor retains their institutional protections, many institutions are ill-equipped to handle external actors. One scholar remembers:

I had the chancellor of my campus calling me, asking me, “what can we do to help you?” I just remember looking at my husband, because I had her on speakerphone. I don’t fucking know. Shouldn’t you guys know? Why are you asking the pre-tenure chick? Isn’t there a manual or something?

Levels of support differ vastly across institutions when a scholar is targeted. One academic who has faced numerous cancellation campaigns across two universities said that at their first university, “It would have been great to have reassurance by someone in a leadership power position” to say that such illiberal campaigns “will not impact you negatively, when you go up for tenure, promotion, etc.” At the scholar’s second university, “the Provost didn’t just have a meeting with me, he convened a meeting of both my entire department and [other relevant] department[s] to answer questions related to academic freedom and people being attacked.”

Whether an institution supports a cancelled scholar or not, being targeted is often more dangerous than being sanctioned. The same academic, highlighting the role of social media in cancellation, darkly described how online, “Women get rape threats, men get death threats.” Threats of physical violence are more likely to arise from cancellation primarily because of the presence of outside actors. One academic discussed hiring full-time bodyguards to protect themselves and their family during a particularly tenuous period where they were in the public eye. Even when these threats are illegitimate or mitigated, scholarly production is often chilled, one academic reveals that after cancellation they “sat on research and didn’t put anything out for a while.”

Sanction and cancellation are bad enough on their own, but a successful cancellation-cum-sanction is a beast all its own. The most vicious threats were reported by an untenured scholar whose sanctioning included their university inviting a speaker whose talk implicitly called for violence against the academic. After deactivating their social media, their husband received a:

threat in which somebody said they were going to dismember our then 3-year-old child and scatter his body parts so wide around the [area] where we live that nobody would find all the body parts. Then [they] would proceed to rape me while he was forced to watch, then decapitate me, and then finally, murder him. [His] family all lives [out of the country and at the same time] reported receiving strange messages on Facebook in a language they didn’t know.

Thankfully, nothing has ever come of these threats. However, the scholar remains a part-time adjunct.

Whereas cancellation is primarily beyond the scope of a university’s purview, at a minimum the university must not legitimate external targeting of a scholar through sanction. In one case, a single email from a random person with no affiliation to the university triggered an internal investigation of a scholar. This is incompatible with free inquiry. In contrast to cancellation, an institution is almost wholly in control of whether a scholar is sanctioned. In these cases, the ethic of institutional neutrality becomes paramount.

Institutional neutrality is a principle meant to prevent universities from taking positions on hotly contested topics. By remaining neutral, a university preempts the formation of a hierarchy of viewpoints and the seductions of becoming an echo chamber. If a university is avowedly institutionally neutral, it is much more difficult to sanction a scholar for their views. The scholar cannot diverge from the university’s position because the university has no position! As the Kalven Report elegantly put it, “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” When sanctioning a scholar over their expression or trajectory of inquiry, the university forgets itself and its purpose.

Ronnie London is general counsel and director of litigation at FIRE.

A federal appeals court held Wednesday that a New Hampshire school district likely violated the First Amendment when officials punished parents for silently donning pink “XX” wristbands at halftime — and refusing to remove them — in protest of the opposing girls’ soccer team fielding a transgender player.

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That tracks with FIRE’s amicus brief arguing the trial court’s extension of student-speech precedent to adults in public forums is unprecedented, unwarranted, and a serious threat to adults’ exercise of First Amendment rights — rights school officials shouldn’t be policing at events open to the public simply because they disagree with the message.

The court reached its decision without answering whether speech by adults at a public high school event should be governed by the First Amendment rules for public forums, or those that give schools more authority over student speech, such as Tinker v. Des Moines, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, Morse v. Frederick, and B.L. v. Mahanoy. The court also declined to decide whether those student-speech rules give schools the same power over parental or other adult speech.

Rather, the court focused on what it called the narrower “question at the center of this appeal” of whether school officials violated the First Amendment when they used the district’s “Public Conduct on School Property” policy to punish parents for wearing pink “XX” wristbands to protest transgender girls playing girls’ high school sports.

On that score, the court said, “the record evidence demonstrates the likelihood that the school district imposed sanctions … because it disagreed with the protest message conveyed.” That does not square with longstanding Supreme Court law holding “the government must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction.”

The court cited the various school officials’ reasons for sanctioning the parents, including the superintendent’s statements that the “XX” symbol conveyed an “exclusionary” message about gender that was “intimidating, threatening, harassing, and discouraging,” and those by the principal who ordered the parents to remove the wristbands, who called the symbol “hateful” and “anti-trans.” In the court’s view, those statements showed school officials were objecting to the viewpoint behind what the parents were saying.

The court also rejected the school’s argument that it had a legitimate interest in restricting the parents’ speech because it might cause a disruption, a standard schools often invoke under Tinker. The evidence showed there was no disruption until school officials chose to intervene to punish the parents. The parents “did not stage any pregame demonstrations; did not march, shout, chant, or otherwise disrupt the game;” and did not confront the opposing player. Instead, they “waited until halftime before donning the ‘XX’ wristbands in a passive, silent gesture of protest.”

There was also “no evidence of harassment, given there is no evidence … any player actually saw the wristbands.” That undercut the school district’s claim it had an affirmative duty under Title IX to protect students from the speech, especially given the later-decided Supreme Court case that recently upheld state laws restricting sports participation based on sex assigned at birth.

As the court put it, “The characteristics of the school as a place of learning reinforce that administrators cannot favor one side of a debate involving parental speech on an issue of prominent public concern, and which, in those parents’ views, concerned the safety of their children.”

Because the silent display of the “XX” symbol fell short of disruption or harassment, the appeals court held the district court was wrong to conclude those interests justified restricting the speech. It accordingly returned the case to the trial court to determine whether to grant an injunction or if relief like a declaratory judgment would suffice.

How many times can you prosecute blasphemous speech under other laws until you effectively have a blasphemy law?

This isn’t just a hypothetical. It’s a question the United Kingdom is posing again and again as police and the judiciary crack down on offensive speech about faith. In the aftermath of the Hamit Coskun saga — in which Coskun was violently attacked after burning a Quran and initially convicted by a judge who cited the attack as evidence for Coskun’s misconduct — more cases now suggest Britain has resurrected the concept of blasphemy under other names.

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One such case involves retired police officer Stephen Gray, who is in the process of appealing after being found guilty of offensive communications under Section 127(1)(a) of the Communications Act 2003. Gray went on trial at Newton Aycliffe magistrates’ court earlier this year after facing charges for reposting two images on Facebook.

The first showed “an image of a Middle Eastern man, who was in his late 20s or 30s, and the words ‘Children in Need,’” as well as the words “time for mass deportation” and a caption calling for donations “to help him move from a three-star to a five-star hotel.” The second meme showed bacon, a man in a turban, and the message: “Fun facts about Bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9-year-old!”

The Telegraph reports that the complainant was Gray’s non-Muslim neighbour, with whom he had previously had an unrelated dispute.

The judge found the first image was not grossly offensive, reasoning that it dealt with a matter of public concern being debated in Parliament. But he reached the opposite conclusion about the bacon meme, saying that it concerned religion rather than politics and was grossly offensive. Gray was ordered to pay more than £1,000 in fines and costs. His appeal is scheduled for November. He fears a conviction could affect his family’s ability to foster children.

“I was initially quite worried because obviously we have to have enhanced DBS checks to foster children,” Gray told The Telegraph. “These kids have enough to put up with without the fear they may be moving again hanging over their heads.”

A second case raises similar concerns, but under a different statute. Two protesters were arrested after holding signs reading “fuck Islam” at the May 16 Unite the Kingdom rally in London, organized by activist Tommy Robinson, and are being investigated for possible offenses under the Public Order Act 1986. The Free Speech Union and Big Brother Watch have asked police and prosecutors to drop the matter.

British law doesn’t protect speech as broadly as the First Amendment does in the United States and permits investigation and prosecution based on the perceived offensiveness of speech.

That brings us back to Hamit Coskun.

As FIRE readers may remember, Coskun, a Turkish-born Kurdish-Armenian asylum seeker, burned a Quran and yelled “Fuck Islam” outside London’s Turkish consulate in 2025. A man named Moussa Kadri chased Coskun with a knife, attacked him, then kicked and spat on him. A passing delivery cyclist also stopped and kicked and spat on him. Coskun was charged with, and soon convicted, of a religiously aggravated public-order offense and fined. (Kadri was handed a suspended sentence for assault, and did not serve any time in prison.)

The trial judge’s reasoning produced one especially disturbing passage. In finding Coskun’s conduct disorderly, District Judge John McGarva cited the fact that Coskun was attacked as evidence of Coskun’s guilt, writing that his disorderly conduct was “no better illustrated” than by the fact that it led to two people assaulting him — even though the judge admitted neither attacker was justified.

Coskun appealed. In October, Southwark Crown Court acquitted him, saying that burning a Quran may offend others, but “the right to freedom of expression, if it is a right worth having, must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.” The Director of Public Prosecutions then challenged that appeal, and Coskun was forced once again to defend his case at the High Court. The court chose not to reverse the lower court’s ruling.

But the damage was done: his victory only came after arrest, prosecution, conviction, appeal, and another appeal by the state. Prosecutors, though they objected to critics’ claims of a return to blasphemy law, made clear they would vigorously pursue Coskun and similar cases of subjectively offensive speech about religion.

A destroyed Quran, “Fuck Islam,” and a meme mocking religious tenets may indeed offend some. The same would be true if you swapped out Islam, and swapped in Christianity, Judaism, or Hinduism. But free people should be able to speak critically of the religions that sometimes influence or even directly determine political policy and social power today.

Offense is simply the price we sometimes pay to live in a free society, and free societies must not allow government officials the dangerous authority of deciding when the state can limit speech about the sacred. That will not magically do away with discord and hate — but it just might create another avenue to silence dissent.

At the height of World War II, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower didn’t want the military’s independent newspaper to become a propaganda tool. He expected his subordinates to keep their “hands off” Stars and Stripes. More than 80 years later, the Pentagon has fired the newspaper’s leaders after they publicly defended that very principle.

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Last week, the Pentagon fired Erik Slavin, editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes, for “insubordination.” Slavin says he was fired for telling CBS in a recent interview that it would be a “red line” if the government told him, “Don’t run a perfectly accurate story. Run this instead. Here it is, written by the Pentagon.” The Pentagon also fired Middle East reporter Lara Korte and publisher Max Lederer. In announcing his retirement just days before, Lederer had said the paper’s “value and mission” differed “in fundamental ways” from the direction of the Pentagon’s leadership.

Eisenhower protected the paper because he understood that soldiers who cannot read the truth cannot be trusted to fight for it. Servicemembers now have reason to wonder whether what they are reading is independent news, or something the chain of command has approved before it reaches the press.

Stripes is funded and operated by the military, but the Department of Defense itself imposed rules for decades requiring the paper to operate independently of military command, with “a free flow of news and information.” The rules also explicitly gave Stripes reporters the same right as commercial journalists to ask questions and gain access.

Stripes wasn’t always fully independent. Though the original was founded to provide news to servicemembers on World War I’s Western Front, it was mired in censorship. The paper’s Board of Control battled the editorial leadership over content, with its founding officer Guy T. Viskniskki removing stories that might hurt morale on the front. However, other sources — including the paper’s final issue during this initial run — claim it maintained editorial independence. The paper was shut down at the end of the war, but the idea that the military could offer an independent newspaper survived.

In 1942, when Eisenhower helped revive the paper, Gen. George C. Marshall called it “a symbol of the things we are fighting to preserve and spread in this threatened world. It represents the free thought and free expression of a free people.”

Eisenhower enforced that principle. In 1945, Gen. George S. Patton threatened Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin over his “Willie and Joe” comic strip, in which Mauldin mocked Patton’s strict rules requiring frontline soldiers to remain clean-shaven at all times. Patton called the cartoon characters “goddam bums,” berated Mauldin in his office for 45 minutes, and threatened to throw him in jail. But Gen. Eisenhower, then the supreme allied commander in Europe, told Patton to back off.

The tension didn’t disappear after World War II, and it became especially vivid in Vietnam. In a 1970 article filed from Saigon, Stripes reporter Bob Hodierne wrote how a soldier whose company had been mauled at Hamburger Hill probably knew less about the battle than his mother back in Des Moines. That is, unless he was lucky enough to get his hands on a copy of the Pacific Stars and Stripes. “Stripes was the one place,” he explained, “that G.I.’s could sometimes read about the shooting, bleeding, bombing, gassing, dying, and killing.”

Hodierne added, “Daily calls to the paper’s Saigon bureau about stories that just didn’t do the military any good were so common that if a day went by when one didn’t come in, the civilian bureau chief, Pat Luminello, would fret.”

One senior officer objected to the paper calling Hamburger Hill “Hamburger Hill,” rather than using the military designation “Hill 971.” Another senior officer was more up front about the basic problem, repeatedly complaining that “Stripes reporters asked questions.”

But that was, of course, the whole point. The military didn’t need another publication that simply repeated what commanders wanted troops to hear. Servicemembers already had official channels for that. What they needed was a newspaper that would tell them what was happening, including what was going wrong.

By the late 1980s, recurring allegations of censorship and command influence became serious enough for Congress to investigate. It instructed the Department of Defense to “manage” the “inherent conflict” between censorship and military objectives. Shortly thereafter, the DoD codified regulations requiring Stripes to operate free from “news management or censorship,” complete with a civilian editor.

The Pentagon has now dismantled much of that framework. On Jan. 15, it removed the old regulation from the federal rulebook, saying the same rules would now be covered by a separate Defense Department directive. But a March 9 memo imposed new restrictions on what Stripes could publish, banning wire-service and syndicated content (even cartoons), restricting FOIA requests, imposing a “good order and discipline” standard, and expanding Defense Department oversight of editorial decisions.

Then when Slavin and Lederer raised concerns about this, the Pentagon fired them. The Pentagon also fired Korte for covering topics the administration disfavors — including, of all things, Bad Bunny concerts. And when ombudsman Jacqueline Smith, the person tasked with defending the paper’s independence, criticized the rule change, the Pentagon fired her too. All because the Pentagon wants to eliminate purported “woke distractions” at the paper.

Announcing the rule change, the Pentagon’s top public affairs official Sean Parnell posted on X:

We will modernize its operations, refocus its content away from woke distractions that siphon morale, and adapt it to serve a new generation of service members. Stars & Stripes will be custom tailored to our warfighters. It will focus on warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability, and ALL THINGS MILITARY.

Stripes has always focused on “warfighting.” That’s not what’s at issue. What is in dispute is whether those boys at Hamburger Hill had the right to know what they had survived just as well as their mothers back home. It’s a dispute about whether the paper will continue to represent a beacon of press freedom within the world’s most powerful military.

Where World War I officers censored content to improve morale, their World War II counterparts declined to censor for the same reason. Eisenhower and his compatriots realized that morale depends on credibility, because you can’t inspire someone to push on if they don’t believe what you’re saying. True morale derives from the spirit of freedom: the enduring feeling of control over what you say, read, and think. At its best, Stars and Stripes harnessed that feeling for servicemembers. It exemplified that true freedom of speech and freedom of the press lies in the ability to speak critically about your country — even (and especially) during wartime.

Across the country, school libraries have become a recurring front in political and cultural fights, with controversial books drawing objections from parents, activists, and public officials alike.

Let’s be clear: Parents and community members have every right to criticize what their schools make available and ask officials to reconsider particular books. That’s free speech, too.

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The problem arises when one individual or group’s political views determine which ideas students can explore in their school library. Massachusetts’ Freedom to Read Law offers a promising solution, one that FIRE has long called for: due process for books.

That means fair and clear procedures for reviewing challenged library materials. The Massachusetts law establishes significant procedural safeguards for challenges to books in the state’s public school libraries. It’s consistent with many of our recommendations, such as considering challenged works as a whole, applying legitimate educational criteria rather than political preferences, and keeping challenged books available until the review is complete.

The Freedom to Read Law also limits who may initiate a formal challenge: current students, their parents or guardians, and school staff. That helps ensure the review process is reserved for members of the school community rather than outside groups seeking to dictate what books are available to students.

Before a challenged book can be removed, the law requires notice, a public hearing, and review by a committee of school personnel. The committee must find, based on clear and convincing evidence, that the material as a whole lacks educational, literary, artistic, personal, or social value, or is not age appropriate for any student at the school.

Just as importantly, the challenged book stays on the shelf while that process plays out. Removing a book first and asking questions later can accomplish the censor’s goal before anyone has determined whether the challenge has merit.

Of course, not every decision to remove a school library book is unjustified. Schools necessarily curate their collections for reasons such as educational suitability, quality, or age appropriateness. A book might be damaged or outdated, or removed simply to make room for new volumes. But the power to curate is not a license to censor.

Massachusetts’ law strikes a good balance. It lets schools maintain age-appropriate library collections, while minimizing the risk that books will be removed for illegitimate ideological or partisan reasons.

In Board of Education v. Pico, a plurality of the Supreme Court said school boards cannot remove books simply because they dislike the ideas in them. The justices emphasized that schools must follow “established, regular, and facially unbiased procedures for the review of controversial materials.” While school officials retain significant authority to oversee library collections, that authority remains subject to the First Amendment.

The new law also says that when adding books to a collection, selected material must “be age appropriate,” “serve an educational purpose,” and “be based on the teacher’s or employee’s professional training and not on personal, political, or doctrinal views.”

In other words, the law’s demand for viewpoint neutrality runs both ways. Librarians cannot use their authority to stock shelves according to their own politics any more than school boards can use theirs to purge books because they dislike the ideas inside them.

The Freedom to Read Law also protects school employees from punishment for good-faith decisions about library materials. Those protections can help ensure that fear of political retaliation does not dictate what students can read.

As schools implement the new law, they should also follow FIRE’s recommendation that review committees issue a written decision explaining their reasons for retaining, relocating, or removing challenged material. Written decisions enable public scrutiny, create a record for judicial review, and make it harder to disguise ideological censorship as a judgment about educational value or age appropriateness.

Book challenges are not going away. Clear procedures will not eliminate disagreement over what books belong in school libraries. But Massachusetts’ approach ensures those disagreements are settled through rules designed to keep official decisions focused on legitimate educational considerations rather than politics.

Other states should take note.

A Nebraska school district censored a student newspaper over a political cartoon criticizing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. After FIRE objected, the district adopted a new policy — one that gives administrators formal power to restrict student journalism before publication.

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The cartoon, by Aidan McClaren, was the first and only editorial cartoon for Gretna East High School’s student newspaper last school year. That cartoon now sits in a storage bin alongside his academic decathlon trophies and journalism awards, after it was scrubbed from the school paper’s website.

McClaren was not originally a cartoonist. But when The Wingspan’s editor-in-chief noted that the paper hadn’t published any cartoons that year, McClaren, then a junior, started thinking. Later, when he got home from his after-school job, the day’s news was top of mind: ICE’s presence in Minneapolis and the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, both by ICE agents in January 2026.

That night, he drew. “I knew I wanted to reference how it was similar to things that I had learned about in my history class that I took my sophomore year,” McClaren said in a video interview. His idea quickly took shape. The finished cartoon showed a young man looking at a factory labeled “History” with gears marked “Bureaucracy” and “Loopholes,” churning out historical moments such as the Palmer Raids and Japanese internment, alongside ICE.

“It took me a full week to muster up courage and show it to my class,” he said. After student leaders signed and approved, the cartoon found its home on The Wingspan’s website on Feb. 10. But it didn’t stay there for long.

Cutting off ICE criticism

McClaren was at home on his couch watching a reality TV show with his mom when his phone buzzed around 9 p.m. on Feb. 12. It was his student newspaper adviser. Two days after The Wingspan published McClaren’s cartoon, school administrators had taken it off the website.

“I was immediately kind of angry,” McClaren said. But McClaren didn’t just let it fester or stun him into inaction. He wrote another piece for The Wingspan — this time, an op-ed about his experience being censored.

“When our publication displayed a cartoon comparing ICE operations to past American military operations, the district administration had it removed,” he wrote. “The justification offered was that the topic was too controversial at the moment, and that people in our community were dealing with it firsthand. By that standard, no editorial cartoon worth publishing would ever see print. That is not a reason to suppress a cartoon. That is a reason to publish one. The district disagrees.”

The school blocked the piece’s publication, too.

Administrators gave McClaren and The Wingspan a choice: they could republish McClaren’s cartoon in the paper if the paper also published a pro-ICE cartoon or if they explained the cartoon for their audience. Otherwise, the pieces would stay offline.

McClaren wasn’t alone in feeling the school’s actions were wrong. Fellow Wingspan journalist Nick Mitchell launched a petition. Editor-in-chief Madeline Petrick asked the school to provide the reasons for the censorship in writing. The students attended a school board meeting on March 30 to ask the Gretna Public Schools Board of Education to adopt a student press freedom policy, reinstate the cartoon, and stop conducting prior reviews.

Skirting around speech standards

FIRE wrote to the school shortly after, echoing McClaren and his fellow student journalists’ calls and explaining the constitutional defects of the district’s actions and subsequent responses to the students.

Administrators pointed to the Supreme Court cases Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier and Tinker v. Des Moines, reasoning they permitted the takedown and subsequent demands for prior review. While it’s true that school officials have greater authority to regulate student speech than the government ordinarily has with respect to the public, that authority comes with important safeguards. Public school students “do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” as the Court said in Tinker.

Tinker permits school officials to regulate student expression when they reasonably forecast that it will substantially disrupt school activities or invade the rights of others. Officials must support that conclusion with actual evidence, not just unsubstantiated fear. Gretna Public Schools offered no more than McClaren’s cartoon itself, which they posited could lead to a substantial disruption. Under Tinker, which doesn’t allow schools to merely rely upon “undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance,” that reasoning fell flat.

The school also pointed to Hazelwood, but that standard did not seem to apply to The Wingspan. Hazelwood grants a more deferential standard to public school officials when dealing with “school-sponsored speech,” allowing them to regulate speech when their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical interests.

But based on the publication’s history of editorial independence, that standard would not apply. Hazelwood undeniably gives administrators more discretion over school-sponsored student speech — including student newspapers that are produced as part of a class or otherwise not set aside “by policy or practice” as forums for independent expression. But as McClaren and his peers noted, The Wingspan had long operated as such a forum. The school only took issue when his anti-ICE cartoon crossed their desktops.

But strong policies cement such protections and make it harder for administrators to deny them. That’s why McClaren, his peers, and FIRE called on the district to promulgate an official student media policy that protected student press rights.

Instead, they passed one that gutted them.

Making prior review permanent

On June 22, the Gretna Public Schools Board adopted an official policy regarding student media. Prior to its passage, McClaren and his peers didn’t have a chance to see what the new rules would be. “They never gave us a copy of the policy to read,” he said. It wasn’t until the policy had passed that McClaren and his peers could review it.

The policy marks a stark change. Student media is now considered “school-sponsored or part of the curriculum” that shall be “under the supervision and control” of not only the adviser but also the “building principal or designee.”

And while McClaren and his peers had largely operated without prior review in the past, the new policy allows for pre-publication review. “Prior to publication or distribution, school-sponsored student media may be reviewed by the classroom instructor, sponsor, principal, or designee to determine whether material is appropriate for publication or dissemination in a school-sponsored forum.” Among material that administrators may withhold is content that “gives the appearance of endorsing a political candidate or pending ballot issue.”

How the district treated McClaren’s cartoon offers little reason to believe it will limit the authority it granted itself to legitimate pedagogical concerns. McClaren connected the cartoon and the school’s reaction to it with the updated language. “You pretty much take a side in an opinion,” he noted. “And so, if [that opinion] were something political, then that would be pretty much in violation of that ninth bullet on there.”

McClaren said he sent emails to the superintendent and school board but didn’t hear back. But he wasn’t fazed. Instead, McClaren decided to look for other options to make change.

He began advocating for New Voices legislation. “I switched my focus so that the law would say they have to change.” He attended the New Voices Student Leaders Institute led by the Student Press Law Center, learning alongside other high school student journalists how to advocate for state-level protection for the student press.

These bills are designed to reverse the effects of Hazelwood, and often include language to stop Hazelwood from being improperly applied on college campuses. These statutory protections generally ensure student media remains free from administrative control or prior review.

“That’s my workaround to make them change it,” McClaren said of the school board and its new student media policy.

But for now, the district-level policy is in place, allowing prior review and placing restrictions on political content. Welcome back to school, Gretna East High student journalists. You have less press freedom now than when you left.